But the whole point of the patent system is that having ideas is easy but implementing them is hard. Patents are there to encourage people to implement ideas as

But the whole point of the patent system is that having ideas is easy but implementing them is hard. Patents are there to encourage people to implement ideas as soon as they are widely known, rather than let them wait around for decades for some government, or charity, or perhaps even nobody at all, to pay for their development. The problem with implementing stuff is that it's a lot harder to build something the first time than the second. It's easy to sit around in a chair and imagine the UI from Minority Report. It is a ton of work to actually design and build that interface, because for every feature and tweak you include in the final product you must test and discard dozens of others. (Unless your business is willing to produce poorly-designed crap, of course.) Unfortunately, a designed product is much easier to copy than to produce in the first place, so every piece of R&D you do is also R&D for your competitors. The patent system tries to rectify this. You complain that patents let people have an idea and then sit around charging others money. And this is true, but - importantly! - it is only true for the life of the patent, which is something like 14 or 17 years. That's the whole point. Once someone has has a brilliant idea they must either build it, or license someone else to build it, or within less than two decades the idea will be worthless. (You can also pray that nobody else has the same idea. This is usually a bad bet: ideas arise when their time is right, and lots of things are invented simultaneously by half a dozen people at once.) In a world without patents, nobody has any incentive to be the first to implement anything bold - your competitors will freeload on your R&D and outcompete you. So you're reduced to tiny incremental improvements with low risk and obvious value (so that they can be sold immediately in high volume, to take advantage of the tiny time window when the innovation is exclusive to your product.) The problem with software patents is not that patents are useless or don't work in general. It's that they don't work well for software, which has many degrees of freedom and is hard to understand. It's that the standards of review are broken; far too many obvious patents are issued. The adjudication is broken: by rubber-stamping patent applications and leaving it to courts to adjudicate them, the Patent Office turns IP into a shakedown racket where the team with the largest legal budget wins. And the whole idea is just too new. If software patents had existed in 1968 Doug Engelbart would have patented everything we use today, those patents would have expired in the eighties and we wouldn't be worried about them anymore.